Amazing what technology can do these days! BusinessWeek has a slideshow online that exhorts us to "Take a quick trip through 4600 years" here. They’ve broken the barriers of time and space, it seems to my SciFi loving self, but no, it’s a neat little interactive history lesson.

While there’s a part of me that resists the concept of distilling almost 5 millenia of social, cultural, technological and political history into 34 slides, the educator in me is at pleased with at least an attempt to create historical context. It jumps over serious chunks of history and development – medicine, strategy, gunpowder, paper etc – and focuses on trading – naturally with the British. Tell me what you think about it?

NB: B-o-o-oring! The map in the background doesn’t change at all, just the text – this could have been a really cool interactive history timeline, but it isn’t. *sigh*